(she/they)
I am a second year PhD student and NSF graduate research fellow working with Allison Strom at Northwestern University. My research focuses on massive stars in galaxies across cosmic time.
I am interested the evolution and properties of massive stars across cosmic time. Massive stars dominate the ionizing spectra of star forming galaxies, influence chemical abundances, and provide feedback that links galaxies to their environments.
Massive stars at high redshift are observationally distinct from those in the local universe, and accurately modeling their radiation is crucial to interpreting the new observations of high-redshift galaxies from JWST.
I work with the stellar evolution code MESA and a variety of stellar population synthesis codes. Existing models can vary significantly in their assumptions and treatments of binary evolution, with large implications for the conclusions drawn from observations.
I use rest-UV-optical observations of high-z galaxies and their local analogs to better understand their massive stars. I am working on comparing multiple different existing models to observations and investigating how we can improve these models to better reproduce observations.
The mass distribution of stars stripped in binaries: The effect of metallicity (Hovis-Afflerbach et al. 2025)
Identifying and Repairing Catastrophic Errors in Galaxy Properties Using Dimensionality Reduction (Hovis-Afflerbach et al. 2021)
Partially Erupted Prominence Material as a Diagnostic of Coronal Mass Ejection Trajectory (Hovis-Afflerbach et al. 2023)
Two New Methods for Counting and Tracking the Evolution of Polar Faculae (Hovis-Afflerbach & Pesnell 2022)